Apple Working to Patch SMS Security Hole Before Black Hat Presentation in the Last Week of July

TechWeb article’s title…

Apple Planning Fix For iPhone SMS Flaw

…seems relatively benign at face value. Then, I read the article and pulled out these factoids that had me pause for thought…

- The person who found the problem, Charlie Miller, is the same person who has won the Pwn2Own contest at the CanSecWest security conference for the past two years. The contest is to see who can take control of a computer using only browser exploits. Mr. Miller has hacked through Apple’s Safari browser on day 1 of the contest for the past two years. You can find the contest rules here.

- The SMS flaw can be used to run unauthorized code with full access to the iPhone

- Mr. Miller is presenting the technique at the Black Hat conference during the last week of July

The good news, however, is that Apple is said to be working on an OS 3.0 patch that will be available before the Black Hat conference starts.

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